President Shimon Peres arrived on a pre-Christmas visit at the official residence of Archbishop Elias Chacour.

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AMONG THE staunch defenders of Bayit Yehudi leader Naftali Bennett is Daniel
“Mush” Meyer, who is the public relations director of the Young Israel Movement
in Israel. Following Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s declaration via major
news outlets that any soldier who refuses a military order cannot sit in his
government, Maj. (res.) Bennett was interviewed on television with Nissim Mishal
and said that, if asked, he would be unable to bring himself to evacuate anyone
from their home and would ask his superior officer to excuse him from such an
operation. He even admitted that he would rather go to prison than evacuate a
family from its home.

Enraged, Mishal shouted at Bennett that he was
refusing a military order. Bennett tried to explain that this was not what he
said, nor would he ask any other soldier to emulate him, but Mishal kept going
at him in an accusatory tone that was subsequently picked up by other media and
became the news item of the week.

In defending Bennett, Meyer, posted to
Facebook a copy of an open letter that had appeared in the Hebrew press in 2005
with an appeal for soldiers to disobey orders to expel citizens from their homes
during the disengagement from Gaza. The letter was signed by a large number of
prominent personalities, among them Prof. Benzion Netanyahu, the father of the
prime minister.

“Does that mean that Bibi would not let his father be a
minister in his government?” questioned Meyer. The answer is obvious, because it
would mean a conflict of interests if any prime minister had a relative serving
in his government. But it is known that when his father was alive, the prime
minister frequently consulted with him, in addition to which his father had no
compunction about voicing his opinions on various issues to the media.

■
ACCORDING TO the Yeshiva World News Website, Deputy Health Minister Ya’acov
Litzman claimed, in an election rally address in Bnei Brak, that Tzipi Livni is
not quite as squeaky clean as she purports to be. Litzman said that he might opt
to reveal a document that has been in his possession since Livni, in her former
capacity as head of Kadima, tried unsuccessfully to assemble a coalition
government. He explained that, notwithstanding Livni’s statements to the
contrary, she was willing to allocate budgets to yeshivot in her bid to form a
coalition. Livni recently launched the Tzipi Livni Party and is now championing
the anti-haredi front, telling the media and repeating in her Bar-Ilan
University address this week that she believes the incoming government must
understand the need for law and order and that rule of law must be absolute, and
“not halachic” – as opposed to those who advocate that in a Jewish state,
Halacha should take precedence over secular legislation.

■ IN ENGLISH, they call it pedigree. In Yiddish, especially in
Orthodox circles, it’s called yihes. Several people living in Israel mostly in
Jerusalem and Efrat, recently received a fresh dose of yihes when their
brother/brother-in-law/ uncle/great-uncle Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, known to his
family as Errol, was named chief rabbi designate of the United Hebrew
Congregations of the Commonwealth. Cultural historian Dr. Gabriel Sivan of
Jerusalem is proud of the fact that Mirvis is the younger brother of Sivan’s
sister-in-law, Lynette, who is married to Sivan’s brother, Vivian, who is the
rabbi of Hove. Mirvis has two younger brothers, Howard and Jonathan, who both
live in Israel. Mirvis, 56, spent several years in Israel during his student
days and will take up his new position in September 2013. He is currently rabbi
of Finchley United Synagogue, where, according to former congregants now living
in Israel, he has done a tremendous job in revitalizing the
congregation.

■ IS THE PRESIDENCY of the World Jewish Congress jinxed?
Former president Edgar Bronfman left his post under a cloud of ignominy and
current president Ronald Lauder, who is a former US ambassador to Austria, has
been declared persona non grata by the leadership of Austrian
Jewry.

Oskar Deutsch, the recently reelected president of the influential
Vienna-headquartered Israelitische Kultusgemeinde (which literally translates as
“Israelite community”), claims that Lauder pledged millions of dollars to causes
in which voting board members of the IKG are involved so that they would vote
for Martin Engelberg, who stood against Deutsch. Both Lauder and Engelberg have
denied the allegations.

Engelberg did ask Lauder to contribute to the
funding of a synagogue for Georgian Jews living in Austria. He also asked for
extra funding for a school, but this did not have to do with the elections.
Deutsch’s election campaign was based on archival research and the construction
of a new museum, whereas Engelberg put his focus on social services. Lauder was
reported by American news outlets as admitting that he had intervened in the
elections, but only to the extent that he wanted the elections to be free of any
kind of coercion.

After publicly castigating Lauder, Deutsch forwarded
his complaints to the European Jewish Congress, which is reportedly taking a
serious view of Lauder’s alleged interference.

■ MEANWHILE, BACK in New
York where he lives, Lauder, together with his brother, Leonard Lauder, and
Nobel Peace Prize laureate and celebrated author Elie Wiesel were dinner chairs
last week at a gala WJC fund-raiser at which President Shimon Peres was honored
with the WJC’s Theodor Herzl Award.

Ronald Lauder hailed Peres as “the
last great founding father of the State of Israel” and called him “a man of
vision” who was “a true champion for peace in our time.”

Peres, who was
unable to attend and accept the accolades in person, sent a videotaped message
in which he thanked the WJC for the honor “The Jewish people are a fighting
people, more with values than with swords,” he said, adding: “Today, we stand
together on two complicated fronts: the State of Israel vis-à-vis Hamas, and the
Jewish people vis-à-vis anti-Semitism. When it comes to Jewish life,
anti-Semitism is a bias and a sick perception.

As for Hamas, after 64
years, when we thought the time had arrived for peace, we have had to face the
ugly, unbelievable assembly of Hamas. Their leaders are calling for the
destruction of Israel, for war, for hatred. They belong to the past. They don’t
have any future. We must try to make peace with those Palestinians ready to make
peace.”

Lauder expressed grave concern about Iran’s continuing nuclear
ambitions, the resurgence of virulent anti-Semitism across Europe and the
ongoing attempts by Israel’s enemies to delegitimize, demonize and isolate the
Jewish state. “The World Jewish Congress is on the ground taking effective
action wherever and whenever Jewish life, property or culture is threatened,” he
stated. “The WJC has always, and will always, stand with Israel as one Jewish
family.”

Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who was among the 300-plus dinner
guests and who was the keynote speaker of the evening, thanked Lauder for his
life-long friendship to the State of Israel and his “positive impact on global
Jewry” and lauded Peres for his “dedicated service to Israel.”

In
discussing the challenges facing Israel and the wider Middle East, Barak said:
“We must be ready to stretch out our hand for peace while keeping the other hand
on the trigger, ready to defend ourselves.” He then clarified Israel’s
determination to prevent Iran from becoming a military nuclear power. “The
Iranians are deliberately trying to create a level of redundancy and protection
for their program, what we call the ‘zone of immunity,’” he said. “Once they
enter the ‘zone of immunity,’ our fate will be out of our hands. The State of
Israel was founded precisely so that our fate would remain in our own
hands.”

Barak called the recent Palestinian bid for non-member status at
the UN “provocative” and said that it “cannot replace direct negotiations
without preconditions, nor should it be used as an excuse not to
negotiate.

The objective of these negotiations is clear: two states for
two peoples.”

Part of the WJC dinner program was dedicated to recognizing
the unique success of the Iron Dome missile defense system. A satellite hook-up
enabled dinner guests to see a live interview with IDF soldiers stationed at an
Iron Dome battery in southern Israel.

It will be interesting to see if
there will be reciprocity on Peres’s part when he awards the President’s Medal
of Distinction in 2013. Without detracting from the achievements of any of the
honorees who received medals at the initial award ceremony this year, there are
not too many people whose activities on behalf of the Jewish world and Israel
can compare with those of Lauder. As Communist regimes in Eastern Europe began
to crumble, Lauder stepped in and established schools and Jewish community
centers, which were decisive factors in helping Jews to regain their heritage
and their religious identity.

Many of these Jews subsequently settled in
Israel and would certainly not have done so without the projects funded by
Lauder.

He has also invested hundreds of millions of dollars in Israel,
and those investments that he put food on the table for hundreds of families.
His involvement with several major Jewish organizations has been beneficial to
Israel at other levels. As president of the Jewish National Fund in America, he
has played a significant role in the development of the Negev.

■ IT’S NOT
easy juggling motherhood, teaching journalism, running workshops in creative
writing, maintaining a career as a journalist and rushing to a series of book
launches in different countries, but Ilene Prusher, who lives in Jerusalem with
her husband and two young children, seems to be taking it in stride. A former
staff writer for The Christian Science Monitor, for which, until two years ago,
she served as bureau chief in Tokyo, Istanbul and Jerusalem, Prusher also
covered major conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Every foreign correspondent
working in these countries needs a fixer – a person who knows their way around,
can organize interviews with the right people, can make travel arrangements, can
act as interpreter when necessary and can fulfill a myriad of tasks which the
foreign correspondent, left to his or her own devices, would not be able to
do.

It was her reliance on a fixer that prompted Prusher, whose overall
career has taken her to some 30 countries, to write her first novel, Baghdad
Fixer, which has received a number of favorable reviews. Prusher, who worked
briefly for The Jerusalem Post has already had a series of launches for the book
in London and east Jerusalem. Last week, the Jerusalem Press Club and Halban
Publishers hosted another launch at the Konrad Adenauer Conference Center in
Mishkenot Sha’ananim, where the audience was largely made up of journalists and
Prusher’s students, family and friends.

Prusher was interviewed about the
book by fellow journalist Jodi Rudoren of The New York Times, who is a mom to
five-year-old twins.

What Rudoren and the audience were most curious
about was how the reportercum- novelist manages to distinguish between fact and
fiction when writing.

Prusher said that she’s heard of writers having two
computers and even working in different rooms depending on whether they were
reporting or writing fiction, but in her house there isn’t room for
that.

Seen in the audience were the Foreign Ministry’s mystery man, Bruce
Kashdan, columnist Barbara Sofer, husband-andwife journalists Avi and Gila
Hoffman, wire service reporter Joshua Brilliant, foreign correspondent Anna
Ponger, retired diplomat Zvi Mazel and his wife, Michelle, who is a tri lingual
author, broadcaster Idele Ross and many other people whose names are familiar
bylines.

Prusher has another launch scheduled for Washington at the end
of the month, and it’s anyone’s guess where else in the world the Baghdad Fixer
will take her after that.

■ LAST THURSDAY, retired soccer star Haim
Revivo was in Jerusalem to meet with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to assure
him of his support and the support of other retired soccer players. Revivo was
also in Jerusalem on Wednesday for an altogether different reason – to act as an
adjudicator in the soccer-inspired cooking contest among the chefs of Fattal
hotels. The contest was headlined “Classico,” in keeping with exhibitions of the
world’s best soccer skills, and joining Revivo in tasting the offerings of the
various teams that came to Jerusalem from the north and south of the country
were celebrity soccer coach Shlomo Sherf and master chefs Hila Alpert, Aviv
Moshe, Ezra Kedem, Segev Moshe, Meir Adoni and Shalom Kadosh, who has been the
executive chef of the Leonardo Plaza Jerusalem in all its incarnations and who
is also the executive chef of the whole Fattal chain.

David Fattal, the
genial, Haifa-born owner and CEO of the chain that owns and manages more than 60
hotels in Israel and Western Europe, is a keen soccer fan but he also believes
in competition away from the soccer field. Because challenge usually leads to
improvement and he wants the restaurants in his hotels to be on a par with the
best restaurants in Israel, he has taken competition to the kitchen. Fattal
credited Kadosh with initiating the contest, and when the winners were announced
after a cocktail reception at the Leonardo Plaza Jerusalem, it was Kadosh who
received a thunderous ovation from chefs and management alike.

More than
any other Israeli chef, Kadosh has drawn attention to the quality and variety of
Israeli cuisine. He has led Israeli teams to prize-winning events abroad; he is
a member of prestige associations of international chefs and he has brought
leading European and American chefs to Israel to cook gourmet kosher meals.
Everyone in the industry respects and adores him. Fattal, who before becoming a
big hotel manager and owner had worked his way up through the ranks of the hotel
business starting as a waiter, admitted last week that he had never worked in a
hotel kitchen and had therefore taken himself off to New York to undergo a
cooking course to round out his knowledge. The fact that he’s worked in almost
every hotel job gives him a fantastic rapport with his employees – and he’s also
generous. Finalists in the contest were given vacations in the Fattal hotel of
their choice and those in second and third places won additional training
courses in Fattal hotels in Germany and France.

Fattal was thrilled that
the master chefs among the adjudicators had been genuinely impressed by the
culinary quality of the contest, and some said that what they tasted surpassed
anything they had previously eaten in hotels. The winning team was the Leonardo
Plaza, Jerusalem, which was a tribute to all that Kadosh invested in training
young chefs, but two of the chain’s Eilat hotels did extremely well in
individual categories.

Sherf showed up at the award ceremony; Revivo did
not. On the political front, the fact that he’s giving his support to Netanyahu
may influence the latter to use his influence to help restore Israel’s relations
with Turkey. An international soccer player, Revivo played for various Turkish
teams and, when he eventually left Turkey, one of the fans who asked him to
reconsider was Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

■ STRANGE AS
it seems, choirs travel from Jerusalem to Berlin to participate in a festival of
synagogue choral music. Two Jerusalem choirs, The Ramatayim Men’s Choir,
directed by Richard Shavei Tzion, and the Yakar Choir, directed by Nurith Cohn,
left for Berlin last week to sing at the Second International Lewandowski
Festival. Most of the pieces they sang were composed by Louis Lewandowski, a
noted composer of 19th century choral synagogue music. Lewandowski lived and
worked in Berlin, which is why the festival is being held there. The Jerusalem
singers were joined by choirs from Johannesburg, Paris, Strasbourg, Berlin and
Warsaw.

Aside from their participation in the festival, members of the
Ramatayim Choir also sang at Sabbath services in local synagogues.

The
grand finale concert of the festival took place in the magnificent 1,200-seat
Rykestrasse Synagogue, which was restored after the Holocaust. All the
participating choirs sang separately and together, reviving works that were
first performed in Berlin 175 years ago. “The fact that two Jerusalem choirs
were performing represented yet another victory over Nazi attempts to destroy
our Jewish heritage,” said Shavei Tzion before leaving for Germany. “It is a
kiddush Hashem [sanctification of the Divine Name].”

■ CHRISTIAN CLERGY
and representatives of Christian communities in the north of the country greeted
President Shimon Peres in Haifa last week when he arrived on a pre-Christmas
visit at the official residence of Archbishop Elias Chacour. Although Chacour
received him cordially, he made no effort to sweep any issues that trouble him
under the rug.

The Christian community in Israel has withstood many
challenges, Chacour told Peres, but is tired of being regarded as just another
minority group when it has proved its loyalty to Israel time and
again.

Chacour wanted to know how long Christians would have to stand on
the sidelines instead of dovetailing with the mainstream and becoming part of
the decisionmaking process.

Preferring to focus more on the positive than
the negative, Peres said that he felt privileged to send Christmas greetings
from Israel to the entire Christian world. He reiterated Israel’s commitment to
the protection of all holy sites and to guaranteeing freedom of worship for all.
He voiced the hope that the Middle East would enter an era of peace and
prosperity.

Gen. Benny Gantz and IAF Commander
Maj. Gen. Amir Eshel are expected at Hatzerim Air Force Base to witness the
165th graduation ceremony of the Israel Air Force Flight School. There is a
strong possibility that among others watching the ceremony will be Hugo Merom,
83, who received his wings at the first flight school graduation ceremony 62
years ago from then-prime minister and defense minister David
Ben-Gurion.

Czech-born Merom was one of 669 Czech children under the age
of 17 who were able to get from Prague to England in 1938 thanks to a rescue
operation organized by British stockbroker Nicholas Winton. Merom subsequently
trained with the Royal Air Force of the United Kingdom, then returned to his
home town of Brno to study engineering, then came to the nascent State of Israel
in 1949 and enrolled in the flight course. He passed with flying colors and
became a combat pilot and later trained other pilots and was assigned to various
roles in the IAF. Following his discharge from the air force, he became a test
pilot for Israel Aircraft Industries, then later an aviation consultant and the
owner of a company that specializes in aviation design and consultation, and he
acts as consultant to designers of airports in many parts of the world. His
son-in-law and grandson are also pilots in the IAF
reserves.greerfc@gmail.com

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